Death of a River Guide Read Online Free Page B

there is no escape: always more rainforest, and more of it irreducible to a camera shot. No plasterboard walls or coffee tables are to be found to act as borders, to reduce this land to its rightful role of decoration. Not that they don’t try, and almost always at the start of a trip there is at least one customer who shoots off a roll or two of film in nervous excitement. But for Aljaz, this place that they feel to be moving behind them, causing them to sometimes give an anxious look over their shoulder, for Aljaz this place is home.
    â€˜What a one we got here,’ whispers his fellow guide, the Cockroach, pointing at the large accountant from Melbourne. ‘He looks a real goose.’
    â€˜Like an emu,’ I hear Aljaz say.
    â€˜Like a …’ says the Cockroach, and I can see him searching for the appropriate animal with which to compare the gauche and arrogant accountant, ‘like a fucken …’ But the precise analogy eludes him. ‘What’s his name anyway?’ whispers the Cockroach.
    â€˜Derek,’ Aljaz replies, then further pondering upon Derek’s form, says, ‘praying mantis.’
    â€˜Yeah,’ says Cockroach, then, ‘no’, says the Cockroach. ‘No. Almost, but no.’ The Cockroach thinks again, then says, ‘Like a locust, that’s what he’s like, a fucken locust.’ And the analogy is entirely correct.
    Derek looks like some strange creature that is far too big to be a human, his large pupils at once oddly sensitive and entirely inhuman, capable of suggesting both an emptiness and a certain greed. His nervous hands are rarely from his mouth, to feed it food or cigarettes, and below that bulky body those ludicrous stick legs clad in luminous striped-green thermal underwear.
    Aljaz turns and heads up a side track, where in early summer they put bees to harvest the nectar of the leather-wood trees that dapple the rainforest rivers with their white flowers as if it were a wedding and their petals confetti. He feels good. Even his guts, for the first time in such a long time, even his guts don’t feel knotted and aching and lurching themselves in readiness for another diarrhoeic discharge. I watch Aljaz change into his rafting gear, dressing in an unhurried fashion, enjoying once more putting on the various bits and pieces. First the bathers, then the long-john neoprene wetsuit with its vivid fluoro-green slashes. Aljaz likes the feel of the wetsuit around his body. It lends him an illusion of strength and purpose. Next layer: the thermal tops, then the bright white and blue nylon outer jacket they call a cag, and finally the lifejacket, bright purple and replete with sheath-knife upon one shoulder, whistle and brightly coloured anodised aluminium carabiners and prussic loops upon the other. Ah, the old carabiners. The customers ask their guides why they wear them on their bodies, and in a condescending tone the guides explain their high and serious purpose; how it is that the carabiner might save all if they become caught in the middle of a flooded river and the guides have to set up pulley and rope systems to get to shore. But the truth is they look dramatic, they lend the necessary sense of danger that instils both fear and respect among the punters - fear of what is to come, respect for the guides on whom they must now depend. It is a visual lesson that talks of life and its smallness. The guides wear the carabiners everywhere, like Mexican revolutionaries with bandoliers, bit players in an extravagant theatre of death. It is all part of the joke. Around his waist Aljaz wraps his flip line, three and a half metres of rainbow-coloured climbers’ tape, buckled with yet another carabiner. Upon the side of the flip line he crabs a throw bag. And upon his head goes the crash helmet. Like some luminous and savage tropical insect he returns to his customers.
    As they ferry the gear down to the river Aljaz notices that Sheena,